Growing Up Emanuel

One would grow up to become a noted bioethicist; another, White House chief of staff, then mayor of Chicago; and the third, a powerful Hollywood agent. But first they were simply the Emanuel boys, fighting and scrapping their way into adulthood, raised to be their best. In an adaptation from his memoir, Ezekiel Emanuel describes how he, Rahm, and Ari forged an unbreakable alliance—and how he discovered that “normal” in the Emanuel family wasn’t always normal in the outside world.

He looked harmless enough, bundled in a blanket and struggling to focus his eyes. My cousin Gary and I were impressed with his grasp refliex—all babies will grab on to a finger as it touches their palm. But since this was his only real trick, he seemed pretty useless. My mother, however, acted as if he were extremely precious and treated him with so much care that it was clear that she loved him every bit as much as she loved me. Part of me knew that here was a competitor.

In December 1959, Gary was five years old and I was just two. On this particular morning, we were jumping up and down on our convertible sofa. It was a monstrous, ugly piece of furniture covered in indestructible black Naugahyde. When opened, it practically filled the living room in my family’s first Chicago apartment, and the metal that held the mattress was so thin and springy that when we used the sofa as a trampoline we could make the whole frame shake.

My mother had fixed breakfast, dispatched my father, a pediatrician, to care for patients at Michael Reese Hospital, and fed and diapered the baby. Dodging the toys on the flioor, she brought the baby into the living room and called to us to stop our gymnastics.

“I’m going to put Rahmy down here and you boys can watch him for a little while. Take care of him,” said my mother. Clearly, she hoped we might like being the big boys in charge for a few minutes. My guess is that she also needed a little break.

We seemed agreeable enough, so she laid Rahm down on the sofa bed’s mattress and surrounded him with pillows to make him secure before leaving the room. It took us only a few seconds before we decided to climb back up on the bed and invent a new game that might have been called “Bounce the Baby.”

We positioned ourselves on either side of the little bundle and timed our jumps so that we landed simultaneously. The mattress bowed and the metal bands that held it were loaded with enough energy to bounce Rahm on the surface of the bed.

Instantly, we grasped the situation’s potential. With enough effort, and perfect timing, we might bounce Rahm off the mattress and onto the flioor. The noise we made as we jumped like a couple of jackhammers brought my mother running into the room.

“Stop! Stop right now!”

It’s not so easy to stop bouncing once you get going. As Gary and I crashed together, my mother scooped Rahm off the bed with a sweep of her arm.

Tall, with long brown hair and a beautiful warm and open face, my 26-year-old mother was young and strong, but the sight of her second-born son being launched into the air had sent her heart racing. As Gary and I tumbled to a stop, she took a moment to catch her breath and choose her next move. Though we had behaved like idiots, my mother knew we were too young to have formed any malice aforethought. As a devotee of the pediatrician and author Benjamin Spock, who appealed to her with his radically sympathetic approach to child rearing, she had vowed to control the impulse to scream, hit, or punish us.

“Boys,” she finally said, “babies aren’t grown-up enough to play that way. You could have hurt Rahmy if he fell off the bed, or you fell onto him.”

Few mothers would have exercised the restraint my mother showed that morning, and fewer still would have had such confidence in Spock’s advice that they would have followed it so closely, and with such conviction, in the heat of battle.

Later, she bundled us three boys up and bounced a stroller down the stairs so we could walk a few blocks in the stinging-cold December air to a local market. Along the way we passed some of our neighbors, older Jewish women who clucked in Yiddish, assuming my mother did not know that they were saying something disparaging about the “hillbillies” with all their kids.

Low rents and easy access to public transportation had made our neighborhood popular with poor whites from Appalachia who fliocked to Chicago seeking jobs. Distinctive in the way they talked and dressed, these newcomers had met with their share of bigotry, and the term “hillbilly” was a put-down. My mother, who refused to use the word, startled the women with a little Yiddish admonition—“Ich bin a yid,” which means “I am a Jew”—to remind them of the ugliness of prejudice and their own ignorance.

In this one morning, the very first memory of my life, Marsha Emanuel had confronted, as a matter of routine, most of the responsibilities and issues that would define her adult life. She had risen early to cook breakfast, care for three kids, and see her husband depart for a day’s work that might not end until late in the evening. Before noon she had saved Rahm’s life, taught Gary and me some life lessons, confronted bigotry on the sidewalk, and done a little shopping. All this would be repeated, in a rough way, for at least 4,000 more days, until the Emanuel boys—me, Rahm, and soon-to-come brother Ariel—started to be more self-sufficient.

Dangerous Little Beasts

‘Dai, shovavim! Dai!”

“Stop, you devils! Stop!” our grandmother shouted at us in Hebrew, but Rahm and I ignored her. We pushed and pulled on my father, Benjamin, who sat firmly on the family-room flioor with his legs crossed and fought back by tickling and kissing us on our necks.

The big challenge of these wrestling matches was to try to shove our father over onto the floor. One by one we would attack him from behind—our welcome for him as soon as he arrived home from work. To my grandmother’s eyes we were dangerous little beasts ganging up on her beautiful son. The wildness did occasionally result in a gouged eye, a bloody scratch, or a twisted ear, but my father was equal to the challenge.

Our dad believed in giving us generous amounts of physical affection. In this he was very different from the typical American father of the era. He hugged us and kissed us so much that some friends and relatives complained he was going to turn us into sissies. He didn’t care. His boys were going to be hugged and kissed by their father, and know they were loved.

My father the pediatrician approached children with the same interest and respect he brought to meeting any adult, and he was truly delighted by the experience. With a little boy he might ask, “How do you know you are a boy?,” and listen very seriously as, in one case, a four-year-old explained, “I know I’m a boy because I wear a kippah at temple.” My father would answer, “Good thinking,” because he wanted to establish a bond of respect and trust.

I responded to that, too. Analytical, logical, and objective, I asked a great many questions about how things worked and found comfort in the answers. This was accompanied by a powerful tendency to experiment—poking, prodding, testing—and to talk, and talk, and talk about everything I saw and felt. Talking about something from all the possible angles was the way I would come to understand the world. To their credit, my parents only occasionally reached the point of exasperation, where they begged me to be quiet.

In contrast, Rahm was quiet and observant, while Ari was forceful, rambunctious, highly social, and hyperactive, and did more moving than talking. (I was born in 1957. Rahm came in 1959, and Ari arrived in 1961.) Ari was, in everyone’s eyes, the best-looking of the brothers, a child so cute he could break a window or a lamp and get away with it, flashing his mischievous smile, which said, “You can’t possibly stay angry at me, can you?” Loud and physically fearless, Ari walked and talked early in order to keep up with his big brothers, and plunged into life with boundless energy and courage. As a toddler, with a pacifier in his mouth, he greeted one of my mother’s friends, Roz, a grown woman, with the question “Onna fight?”

We grew up in a home where the adults enjoyed being parents. Our mother was a committed civil-rights and anti-war activist, but she considered raising us to be the most important job she would ever have—her calling. She wanted us to feel that the world was a safe place, where we were loved and free to express our thoughts and ideas.

This confidence was reinforced by the remarkable amount of freedom our parents gave us from a very young age. In 1963, before milk cartons were decorated with photos of abducted children and supervised “playdates” became the norm, I led Rahm and Ari on expeditions around the neighborhood. Although I was barely six and my brothers were two and four, I was allowed to take them to the end of the block, across a street, and through an underpass beneath Lake Shore Drive (a multi-lane semi-expressway) to a public rock garden, where we would pretend to assault a playground fort.

Sometimes our pretend fights became real. When Ari was still sleeping in a crib, Rahm and I would climb onto the top level of our bunk bed and jump into it with such force that it rattled the hardware that held it together and bounced Ari off the mattress and into the air. Unlike Rahm when he was an infant, Ari loved it.

The wild, physical play helped us to bond as brothers. There was also something about sharing a room that made it easy for us to develop an intense level of loyalty and trust. There, we tested ourselves against each other and, in the unguarded moments before we fell asleep, we confessed our worries and hopes and practiced a boy’s version of empathy.

In our shared room we also got to review—people now call it “process”—the kinds of traumas inevitably visited upon rambunctious boys. In our case, nearly all of these events involved physical injuries. When I was five, I hit the back of my head on a cast-iron radiator with a Tootsie Pop in my mouth. The impact knocked three teeth out of my mouth and left a fourth dangling by a little strand of tissue. Two years later, five-year-old Rahm suffered a terrible hand injury. It happened when my friend Georgie announced that he had learned some dirty jokes. We were in the vestibule of his building, next door, and he and I decided to dash outside to exclude Rahm. He rushed to follow us, and the huge oaken door slammed on his hand.

As Rahm screamed in pain and blood spurted from his fingers, I took him home, where my mother wrapped his injured left hand. In the cab to the hospital, she struggled and sometimes failed to stay composed. The surgeon who unwrapped Rahm’s hand found two fingertips dangling from shreds of skin. He stitched them back together as well as he could, although to this day they look a little lumpy, as if the tips were hastily pasted on.

Hands seem to be our family’s Achilles’ heel. Years later, while working at an Arby’s, Rahm would cut his finger on his right hand so badly that it eventually required amputation. And one Sunday on the way to some friends’ house for brunch I was caught between my brothers in the backseat of my father’s Pontiac Grand Prix as Ari and Rahm wrestled over an opened can of mixed nuts. Suddenly the tips of two fingers on Ari’s hand were sliced almost completely off by the sharp rim. Blood spurted on all three of us. Our father drove straight to Mount Sinai Hospital’s emergency room, where he made a perfect repair himself.

Fortunately, our more common mishaps were minor ones, which nevertheless led to howls of complaint. When my mother ran out of patience with our whining, her frustration turned to anger. And worse than physical punishment were the long silences that followed. My mother could seethe for hours, sometimes even for days. No apology, dandelion bouquet, or handmade card would make her smile if she wasn’t ready and willing.

“Think Three Moves Ahead!”

At the time it seemed a bit strange that our father never taught us much about music or skiing, two passions of his. To his credit, though, he did eventually introduce us to chess, which he played extremely well. These after-dinner and Sunday-afternoon games were played either at the dining-room table or in the living room, where the board was set up on the round, white marble coffee table.

My father did not believe in falsely building his sons’ self-esteem by purposely letting us win, or tolerating sloppy play. Sometimes he would simply stop the game and then show us, with quickly moving hands, how the next dozen moves would inevitably lead us to defeat. He would admonish us with two messages: “Think three moves ahead!” and “Remember what Napoleon said: ‘Offense is the best defense.’ ”

Hyperactive and distractible, none of us ever got good enough at chess to even come close to beating our father. But these games reinforced our natural tendency to be aggressive in whatever we set out to do. Life was about competition, and if you couldn’t finish at the top in one pursuit, you found the game where your talents allowed you to win.

Our mother had her own high standards. While she loved us unconditionally, we were never able to rest on the laurels of our achievements for more than a millisecond.

Straight A’s on your report card? she’d ask me. Great. Now what are you doing about the big project due in two weeks?

A victory on the wrestling mat, Ari? Good going. Now, how are you doing in math?

A standing ovation for a dance recital, Rahm? Wonderful. Why can’t you turn some of those B’s into A’s?

Although Rahm did well enough in school, he always heard from teachers that they expected the same straight-A performance they’d gotten from me. Though fiercely intelligent, especially when it came to sizing people up and assessing a social situation, he was not naturally inclined to sit at a desk and put in extra effort to turn a B into an A. As my father often said, without noting that the phrase applied to himself at that same age, “Rahm always tries to get the maximum for the minimum.”

The fact was, Rahm was not interested in becoming a copy of his older brother. When teachers mentioned my grades or our parents posted our report cards on the refrigerator, he was neither envious nor motivated to match me. Instead, he resented being compared and became determined to find a way to succeed on his own terms. In the meantime he would do whatever was necessary to get under my skin as often as possible.

On many nights, Rahm got his revenge by lying in bed and whistling a long, complicated melody while keeping time by snapping his fingers. Since I could neither whistle nor snap my fingers, this little show was a good way to annoy me. When we had lived in our previous apartment, on West Buena Avenue, and he bunked over me, I would try to stop him by kicking his mattress from below so hard he had to hang on like a cowboy on a bronco to keep from being thrown onto the floor. When we moved to a bigger place, on Winona Street, and he shared the bunk bed with Ari, who laughed as Rahm trilled away, I’d bomb him with pillows or wrestle him to the floor to get him to stop.

Ari seemed to be born unafraid of competition and conflict, especially physical battle. Sympathetic to the underdog, he usually took Rahm’s side when the fight became physical, and as he quickly grew to be bigger and stronger, their little team became quite powerful. More than anything, though, Ari seemed to enjoy inciting either one or both of his brothers whenever things got too quiet. With mischief in his eyes and a grin on his face, he would needle and annoy until someone lashed out. The instant you moved to swat him, he would dash off so quickly that it was almost impossible to catch him. All the while Ari would laugh with excitement because he had made something happen.

Inside the family, Ari’s modus operandi fell squarely in the range of normal. We all liked to test and challenge, and any hard feelings that arose during our fights faded faster than the bruises. He was also accepted by the tougher kids in our neighborhoods because of his fearlessness. But when he got to school, his restlessness became a problem. Ari was highly verbal, incredibly alert—he had a great memory and learned certain things very quickly—and very charming, yet when it came to reading and writing, he ran into a wall.

While other kids wrote out letters, Ari struggled to translate what he saw on the blackboard to the paper on his desk. “Dog” became “bog” and “boy” became “yod.” Born into a home filled with books, and now settled into a school where scholarship equaled success, Ari fell further and further behind his brothers and his classmates.

Today, a boy like Ari would be diagnosed with dyslexia and would be given help from specially trained teachers. In the mid-1960s, dyslexia and attention-deficit disorder were just beginning to gain attention among physicians and educators. Like most kids with learning difficulties back then, Ari was lectured and given extra drills in the belief that he just needed to pay attention and practice a little more.

Ari could not make others understand that he was trying as hard as he could. Eventually he began to fear that his inability to read was caused by a character defect or a basic lack of intelligence. He did not share these feelings openly. In fact, he buried them so deeply that they came out only in bursts of aggression or anger. He argued and got into fights that showed he was upset, but he never explained his motives. Then, in an unexpected moment, the truth would bubble to the surface.

One day, he and my mother walked to the park with our dog Andele. It was the end of August, and Ari, then seven, was thinking about the school year that lay ahead. As they walked he searched the ground for sticks that he then threw for the dog to fetch. “Look, Mommy!” he shouted as he wound up and threw a stick so far that it landed beyond the glow of the streetlight.

“Wow, Ari, you’ve got quite an arm,” said my mother.

“Yeah,” he replied, “I can throw, but I still can’t read.”

Rahm and I knew something of what Ari felt. As brothers we may have teased and tortured him on other matters, but we did not try to embarrass him when it came to reading and writing, so painful were his struggles.

When Rahm Was “Black”

Outside our apartment, the neighborhood was full of families from different ethnic and religious backgrounds. Shared aspirations for middle-class comfort, safety, and status meant that we all had much in common. However, there was no denying that our differences bred prejudice and often led to conflicts, especially with kids who had recently arrived from Appalachia. These boys and girls had definite feelings about “kikes” and “nigger-lovers” and were aggressive about expressing them.

We understood we belonged to a minority that had suffered in the past and was still subject to discrimination and exclusion. However, change was coming fast. Jews were quickly becoming accepted into the white majority, and our parents taught us that nothing that really mattered was beyond our reach and we had little to fear as we moved through the world. We were safe in this assumption except, ironically enough, when Rahm was “black.”

Rahm and Ari had my mother’s skin coloring. Both brothers needed just a few days in the sun to turn the color of café au lait. By the end of the summer the two of them were almost chestnut brown. With curly black hair and a broad, flat nose, Rahm could easily pass for an African-American.

We got most of our ultra-violet rays at Chicago’s Foster Avenue Beach, which became our regular summer hangout. In yet another demonstration of her confidence (today it might be called child neglect), our mother would send us off alone to spend entire summer days playing in the lake and on the sand. I led the troop down Winona, through the Foster Avenue underpass, which let us safely cross Lake Shore Drive, and then into the park, where the beach stretched northward for a quarter-mile or so.

In this time before cell phones, our mother did not need to hear from us every half-hour to be reassured that we were O.K. As the hours passed, she somehow assumed we were fine, and for the most part, her confidence in us, and in the city, was well placed. Exceptions arose when some stranger decided to call Rahm and Ari “niggers” and demand that we get off the beach.

Although legally open to anyone, in the 1960s Foster Beach was segregated by custom and practice. Certain people—mostly white males between the ages of 10 and 15—made it their business to enforce the unwritten whites-only rule. When they called my brothers niggers and tried to bully us off the beach, we—naturally—refused to move. Instead, one of us would answer, “You can’t make me leave.”

Usually these confrontations ended quickly because we presented a united front and would create enough commotion to attract the attention of the lifeguards. When shouting wouldn’t work and we had to fight, we did.

It may seem paradoxical that boys raised by a pacifist mother in a house where plastic squirt guns were banned were so willing to throw punches. But we felt no inner conflict. We were not pacifists. When we were at the beach or walking the streets, we were city kids, not anti-war activists. I don’t remember our parents ever scolding us for these fights, nor did they call the police or search for the parents of the kids who gave us a hard time. Instead they appreciated the way that city life, which naturally included a bit of scrapping, helped us to become more assertive and independent.

Our strength was reinforced by the bond of brotherhood that grew every time we confronted bullies as a team. In the heat of the battle we always knew we had one another. At night, when we settled into the room we three shared, we sorted through the day’s events. Exhausted from his hyperactivity, Ari would say a few words but then fall asleep holding on to a favorite blanket that he kept well into grade school. Rahm and I might play catch with the stuffed elephant that was my version of a teddy bear. As the elephant flew across the room, Rahm might say something like “Weren’t you afraid those guys were going to kill us?” Tossing it back, I would confess my fears but also repeat what our parents had taught us: “You can’t run away. If you do, then you’ll be more scared the next time.”

During these conversations and the endless hours we spent playing games, we resolved our insecurities and tested the limits of competitiveness. Cheating at Monopoly? That’s normal, so everyone had to keep a close eye on the banker. Arm-twisting during a wrestling match? It’s O.K. until the other guy starts to cry. Sitting on someone’s chest and tickling him? Well, what else are brothers for? Moment by moment, through contests, conflicts, and confessions, we figured out the limits of behavior and forged an unbreakable alliance.

Rahm’s love of dance started with my mother’s decision to make us all take ballet lessons, after we had moved from the city to the suburb of Wilmette, when I was 10. An old Bar Mitzvah injury notwithstanding, our father was a terrific dancer. Our mother figured that it would be a good skill for us to possess, too. But for reasons that have been lost to time, she signed us up not for ballroom or modern dance but for introductory ballet.

Ari, Rahm, and I would have preferred to study karate or jujitsu, but there was no way we could escape the dance studio. To our relief, the three of us had a private lesson each week, which spared us the judgment of other kids, except when we were spotted going in or out of the studio by classmates or friends and had to endure their taunts. Once, Ari chased a boy down the sidewalk and beat him until he cried for mercy after he asked if we had remembered to bring our tutus.

Following a year devoted to learning the first through fifth positions and other moves, Ari and I had had enough and were permitted to quit. Rahm, to everyone’s surprise, stuck with it.

For the next six years, he endured teasing from friends and classmates—and risked being spotted in his tights—in order to master ever more challenging elements of dance.

By the time Rahm reached high school, he was good enough, and confident enough, to let anyone know about his passion. With Ari helping to police the knuckleheads, Rahm got much positive reinforcement for his efforts, and performed in our high school and choreographed dances for others.

I received similar family support for my own interests. One example of this, once I had declared my affinity for medicine, involved a cow heart, with lungs attached, that my grandfather Herman acquired somewhere in his wanderings through butcher shops and delivered to me wrapped in white, waxy butcher paper. My parents allowed me to dissect these organs on a card table that a friend and I set up in the family room and covered with plastic. But even though my father gave us tools and anatomical aids, he did not coach us through this work or even discuss it with us. He left it to us to find out how the valves worked, discover the artery opening, and trace the vessels that move blood to the lungs and back to the left atrium.

While I played surgeon and Rahm required frequent taxi service to rendezvous with beautiful ballerinas, Ari made very few requests for help with any of his interests. This was probably because he already spent more than enough time with my mother working on academic skills. He made it a point to go it alone in many of his extracurricular pursuits, most of which involved moneymaking. The first was probably the sale of our mother’s cheesecake, which she prepared on a weekly basis and included in our school lunches. The cake was almost achingly good, but Ari had the discipline to be satisfied with the piece he had had at dinner so that he could sell his next day’s portion at school to the highest bidder. My mother did not have any idea this was going on until a neighbor telephoned to ask her to supply her with an entire cheesecake for a party. For a moment she thought this request was part of the suburban subculture—maybe she could ask Mrs. Grant for a pot roast—but then the caller asked her for a price.

“How much do I charge?” she asked incredulously. “What gave you the idea that I sell cheesecakes?”

Once the two women stopped laughing, my mother had to say she felt a bit encouraged by Ari’s initiative. She also insisted on making one of her cakes and delivering it to our neighbor as a gift. Soon after, Ari showed more entrepreneurial potential when he drafted Rahm and me and some other boys as laborers to do yard work while he kept a cut of the proceeds for himself. These little businesses required a degree of planning and organization that stood in stark relief to Ari’s struggles at school and his many conflicts with our father.

No one would ever question our father’s devotion or skill as a parent, but Ari, the youngest shovav, certainly challenged his patience. In some instances he deliberately tried to provoke my father. At every restaurant, for instance, he would scan the menu to identify the most expensive appetizer, entrée, and dessert, and order them all. This habit was partly connected to his dyslexia. He had trouble reading menus, and he found it easier just to look for the higher prices, which he anticipated were associated with the better dishes. However, he knew my father was exceedingly thrifty—all right, cheap—and by ordering up, Ari could get my father’s goat.

In other cases, Ari really could not help but be annoying. No matter what day of the week it happened to be, or whether school was in session or not, he was always awake by five A.M. Jittery and anxious, he could not stay in bed, and he would prowl around the house looking for something to occupy his mind and help him burn off excess energy.

Although he tried to be quiet, inevitably Ari would awaken Rahm, or me, or, worse, my father on a morning when he was trying to recover some of the sleep he had lost during a busy workweek. To his credit, our father understood that Ari was just too energized to control himself. But he was less sanguine as Ari grew older and learned the fine art of persistent and intentional irritation.

Typically these episodes involved something as mundane as a television-channel-changing contest. It might begin with my father, home after a long, hard day at work, descending into the family room and stretching out on the sofa to watch something on Channel 11, Chicago’s public-television station. Ari would waltz in and change the channel. In these days before remote controls, my father would have to command Ari to restore his program of choice, or else he would have to get up from the sofa, walk across the room, and do it himself.

One day Ari switched the TV to All-Star Wrestling on Channel 32. My father got up and flipped the channel back to 11. Just as my father sat down on the sofa, Ari reached up from his spot on the floor and flipped it back to Channel 32. My father then got up and changed it back to Channel 11. Ari waited again and as my father sat he flipped the channel.

Thirty-two.

Eleven.

Thirty-two.

Eleven.

Seated nearby, Rahm the peacemaker (and future politician) laughed nervously to encourage my father to see the humor in the situation, all the while praying that his little brother would stop before he crossed that imaginary line and reached my father’s breaking point.

As Ari continued to defy him, my father finally warned, “You better stop it now!”

Ari should have known better than to risk one more flip. He did not. “*Gudt-*dammit!” my father cried, and leapt off the sofa. Ari dashed up the stairs to the kitchen. My father gave chase. Rahm followed. Hearing the commotion, I came out of my room just in time to see our father chasing Ari through the kitchen, where my dad picked up a large carving knife and shouted something about how Ari better not let himself get caught.

My brother raced through the living room, putting enough distance between himself and our father so that when he dashed up the steps to his bedroom Rahm and I could fill the space in the stairway and slow down his knife-wielding pursuer. We grabbed our father, and though we knew in our hearts he would never hurt Ari, we used all our strength to hold him back until we heard the door to Ari’s room slam shut. At this point our father gave up and, having spent most of the energy that had powered his outrage, simply dropped the matter and walked away.

“Dislike” Is a Kind Way of Saying It

If you do it right, your first experience living in the adult world, far from family and childhood friends, forces you to see yourself in a new light. This does not happen without pain and suffering.

I graduated from high school in 1975 and went off to college at Amherst. Not surprisingly, given my family of origin, I began many relationships there with arguments. I considered this perfectly normal. As it turned out, hardly anyone else felt the same way. As Andy Oram, one of my closest friends from college, recalls, “I heard Zeke before I first met him. I was coming back from a class or something and I heard arguing coming from a friend’s room down the hall. In this high squeaky voice this guy was saying, ‘You’re wrong. You’re wrong and you know it!’ I ducked my head into the room to see what was going on, and this kid, Zeke Emanuel, was arguing about something like his life depended on it. I loved arguing, too, and it never bothered me. But I was one of the few who got it. With other people it inspired a lot of dislike.”

Dislike is a kind way of saying it. In fact, I inspired the kind of feeling that moved others to set fire to my dorm-room door and ring my phone at all hours of the night.

When I think back on how unhappy I was in my first two years at Amherst, I have to conclude that the transition from home to the larger world is ever more painful the longer and more fiercely you resist it. As an Emanuel, I resisted with instinctive, defensive intensity. As far as I was concerned, the problem at Amherst was not me but the other students—their conventionality and unwillingness to ask the “big questions” of life.

Fortunately, Andy was such a good friend that he would listen and argue with me endlessly and never run out of patience—often laughing at my narrow naïveté. My perspective began to change one weekend when he took me to his home in upstate New York. I discovered that his family was far more reserved and genteel than mine. Andy and I wore ties for dinner with his mother, who was a widow. But while they were polite, the Orams were also a feisty group, and their conversation sparkled with ideas even while it was better mannered than an Emanuel dinner. This was a revelation to me, to see how a family might enjoy the thrust and parry of debate without raised voices and four-letter words.

When Andy came to my house, I was able to see how life in Wilmette might seem to someone with fresh eyes. In the loud and warm reception we received upon arrival, Andy was taken by my mother’s generous hugs.

The next morning, at breakfast, he got the full Emanuel treatment. As he would later recall, “I had never heard anyone swear or tell an off-color story at the table, and in the first five minutes at breakfast Rahm must have said ‘fuck’ five times. Ari and Zeke punched the shit out of each other’s shoulders, and their dad told this wild story—a long dirty joke, really—about two kids growing up in Israel who wanted another brother. I’ve never laughed so hard in my life. It wasn’t just because the story was funny. It’s because it was a really gross story, sexual and crazy, told in this very matter-of-fact way at the breakfast table with Zeke’s mother and me, this guy they don’t even know. That would never have happened at my house, but at the Emanuel house it was just normal.”

Like just about everyone, Andy was charmed by my father’s warm, open, and easygoing personality. My mother, on the other hand, made Andy feel on guard. “She always seemed a tiny bit dangerous,” he remembered.

In truth, both my parents pushed until you pushed back. It’s ironic, because in word and deed our mother and father both offered the clear message that they could not abide bullies and that they expected us to stand up to them whenever possible. And yet there were inevitably moments when we bullied one another, not to mention outsiders. Indeed, the impatient, pushy Emanuel style is so well known that during a recent job interview I was asked, point-blank, whether I had the levelheaded temperament the position required.

I know this admission is no big surprise to anyone who has heard about us. Everyone knows that Rahm can be a rough-and-tumble politician and has done his share of shouting and cursing. And there’s a foulmouthed, hyper-aggressive Hollywood agent on the HBO show Entourage who is modeled after Ari and does little else but bully people. But as obvious as our flaws are to others, it’s difficult to recognize them in ourselves.

What other shortcomings do we Emanuels share? Sarcasm is one. Eye-rolling snobbery is another. But, thankfully, as we age, these bad habits are fading, and our appreciation for the advantages and gifts we received while growing up Emanuel has increased.

As adults we are constantly checking in with one another by e-mail and phone. It’s not unusual for us to talk four or five times in a week. Indeed, going a whole week without connecting causes us to worry that something bad has happened. (It was not until I was middle-aged that I discovered how unusual this is for adult siblings.) And we are able to support one another in a way that is uniquely consistent, specific, and well informed. No one is more critical of me than my brothers, but no one is more supportive and loyal. The bond we formed together is unbreakable.